The manuscript of MARIE EQUI accompanied Larry Lipin on a flight from Oregon to Iowa this past June. He generously agreed to read the narrative and compose a book blurb during the only time period available during a busy summer. I’m honored that he did so. Lipin is a distinguished and much-awarded professor and chair of the Department of History at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. (Pacific University, founded in 1849, is the second oldest university in the state). Lipin has published two books and has received awards from the Oregon Historical Society for his articles in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. He notes on his university website that he is currently researching the career of a woman journalist, Eleanor F. Baldwin, who wrote a column in Portland’s Evening Telegram newspaper for several years. She regularly “expounded a consistent social justice form of progressivism, including concern over gender equality and worker rights, as well as an interest in spirituality, particularly those directions that engaged women actively.”On his approach to history in the classroom, Lipin writes: “On my better days, I teach students to appreciate history as an important means of coming to know what it is to be human, and to see that it provides perspectives into the way people create culture and society and, at the same time, are shaped by it.” (for his full description, see his campus webpage at http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/faculty/larry-lipin-phd).

Here's what he wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Marie Equi has long intrigued students of radicalism. A defender of women’s and worker’s rights, an opponent of the First World War, a committed medical professional who provided her patients with treatments that included abortion, Equi emerges in this well-researched biography as a generous, strong-willed and committed individual who enjoyed professional success, but openly flouted bourgeois conventions in her politics and her personal life, which was characterized by a series of same-sex relationships. In putting together her fascinating life and placing it in historical context, Michael Helquist has done great service to those interested in Progressive Era radicalism in Portland.